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Exclusive Cover Reveal: Once Upon A Sunset
By Tif Marcelo

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Once Upon A Sunset

How striking and delightful is the cover of ONCE UPON A SUNSET?! I’m so thrilled to reveal it for you today and give you an exclusive sneak peek at this new standalone novel by Tif Marcelo, whom you may know and love as the author to the charming THE KEY TO HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Marcelo returns with a heartwarming story of a woman who embarks on a journey of self discovery when she travels to the Philippines to reconnect with her long-lost family.

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Synopsis

The author of The Key to Happily Ever After—“a true gem filled with heart, laughs, and a cast of delightful characters” (Nina Bocci, USA TODAY bestselling author)—returns with a heartwarming and charming novel about a woman who travels to the Philippines to reconnect with her long-lost family…and manages to find herself along the way.

Diana Gallagher-Cary is at a tipping point. As a Washington, DC, OB/GYN at a prestigious hospital, she uses her career to distract herself from her grief over her granny’s death and her breakup from her long-term boyfriend after her free-spirited mother moves in with her. But when she makes a medical decision that disparages the hospital, she is forced to go on a short sabbatical.

Never one to wallow, Diana decides to use the break to put order in her life, when her mother, Margo, stumbles upon a box of letters from her grandfather, Antonio Cruz, to her grandmother from the 1940s. The two women always believed that Antonio died in World War II, but the letters reveal otherwise. When they learn that he lived through the war, and that they have surviving relatives in the Philippines, Diana becomes determined to connect with the family that she never knew existed, though Margo refuses to face her history. But Diana pushes on, and heads on a once-in-a-lifetime trip that challenges her identity, family history, and her idea of romantic love that could change her life forever.

Infused with Tif Marcelo’s signature “sexy, adorable, and heartfelt” (Kate Meader, USA TODAYbestselling author) voice, Once Upon a Sunset is a moving and lyrical celebration of love, family, and second chances.

Excerpt

Diana filled her tight lungs with air after she read the last letter of the bunch. Everything that had bothered her in the last twenty-four hours had faded in oblivion. Her issues with Carlo, her patients, her job—all had taken a back seat to the letters that had appeared out of the rubble in her garage: a volcano of information that destroyed everything true about her family history.

And behind the lava? Anger.

“What the fuck?”

“Diana!” her mother admonished, crunching into another saltine cracker. She had taken a sleeve from the pantry sometime between the sixth and seventh letter and was down to less than half a sleeve. “Language.”

“Mother. Language is the least thing you should worry about.” She flapped the letters in the air. “I mean. What the hell is this? Is this a prank?”

Of course it wasn’t a prank, though Diana had to ask. Every envelope’s postmark seemed authentic, the peeling stamps real.

“Well then we have to find out. There has got to be more—there must be clues.”

And Diana was off running, in her head at least. This was what made her a good doctor—it wasn’t her ability to work without sleep, and it wasn’t her photographic memory. Nor was it her empathy, though quickly waning these days. It was the search for the answer, the diagnosis, the algorithm in which a coordinated series of questions became a choose-your-own-adventure puzzle.

Diana stomped to the garage before she heard her mother answer. She flipped the lights on. Junk greeted her—three generations’ and an ex-boyfriend’s worth. Her eyes darted away reflexively to stifle her increasing claustrophobia, and she sidestepped to where her grandmother’s things were stacked.

But when she came upon them, the tops of their boxes were unsealed.

“I’ve already gone through them,” her mother said from behind her. “Before you came home.”

Diana opened the boxes anyway and looked inside. She found framed pictures, books, Christmas ornaments. Little snippets of her grandmother, though the boxes were free of anything truly telling. Diana and Leora were similar in this respect. Everything in her granny’s house had had a function. When Diana was growing up, it’d been a relief to trounce through Granny’s home in comparison to her own mother’s, who had walls of photographs staring back at her, papers littered about, her workspace spreading out into the entire house.

Margo had a paper trail that could have pinned her down at a diner in West Virginia in 1996 for a photography assignment. Leora, on the other hand, was a mystery.

But now Diana wished Leora had been a pack rat.

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This post contains affiliate links, meaning I’ll receive a small commission should you purchase using those links. All opinions expressed are my own. I receive no compensation for reviews.

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